On
January 29, a man from my home town of Grants Pass, Oregon made the
news after receiving the wrong medications from a Walgreens pharmacy.
What made the story interesting is that the pills weren’t for him,
45-year-old Michael Rae. They were
for his stepdaughter-to-be, Alesha Rose, who is all of four years
old.

Alesha
had her tonsils removed, and her doctor prescribed a liquid painkiller.
Rae went to pick it up at Walgreens, located at 111 Union Avenue.
However, he ended up getting two bottles with 300 tablets of Tylenol
No. 3.

Rae
was willing to make a big deal out of it, and notified the local press.
As the news director of KAJO radio, I was among those who covered
it, and interviewed Rae in the process.

After
I had been asked to do a national story about it, I phoned Rae
and arranged a follow-up interview. We had initially agreed to meet
at a local coffee shop, but it was crowded with foul-mouthed teenagers,
so we ended up going to a nearby park.

There,
Alesha Rose and her older sister fed some of the many ducks while
Rae and I sat down to talk.

But
instead of talking about Rae’s incident, something else happened.

Rae
and I ended up talking about the entire health care system, and how
this incident is a mere microcosm of a much larger problem.

The
issue of health care is the subject of many discussions these days,
in this presidential election year, especially with dueling Democrat
candidates promising “free health care” for everyone.

It
was easy to tell right away that Alesha Rose was perfectly healthy,
as she played and ran around the park. But that certainly wasn’t because
of the drugs she had been prescribed by her doctor.

What
happened was that Rae went to a local store and bought an over-the-counter
generic liquid pain reliever for less than two dollars.
After two days, Alesha Rose’s pain disappeared, without her having
taken a single pill.

As
I sat talking to Rae and watching Alesha Rose play, I remembered that
the War on Drugs started when I was around her age. Now, here we were,
nearly 25 years later.

To
the government’s credit, there were no herds of drug dealers roaming
the park that day. It could even be said that I no longer have to
worry about the average street dealer. But what I have to worry about
now is pharmaceutical companies who enjoy tremendous amounts of government
protection, and who seem intent on putting every child in America
on Ritalin while their parents waste away on Valium.

This
is all a few mere weeks after the tragic passing of actor Heath Ledger
following an overdose. But it wasn’t heroin that killed him or any
other of the narcotics I had been raised to fear—it was a combination
of perfectly legal prescription drugs.

Every
day you hear about children abusing prescription drugs and cough syrup,
and raiding mom and dad’s medicine cabinet to feed the habit. Yet
the law would tell you that the true problem is the hippie sitting
at home smoking a joint while munching Doritos and listening to Pink
Floyd.

Rae
and I shared more than one nervous laugh as we talked about the current
state of things, but there were serious moments as well. He told me
about how he watched his mother die of cirrhosis. But it wasn’t the
disease that killed her. No, it was the shot after shot of morphine
given to her by the very people who were tasked with saving her life.

As
it stands, Rae doesn’t have health insurance. Luckily, his children
do.

I
myself have just gotten health care, and not a moment too soon. This
came after spending the better part of a decade being uninsured, while
watching money get taken out of my every check to pay for health care
for government employees who make way more money than I do.

What’s
really ironic is that Rae and I could have taken the bag of pills
he had accidentally received, gone back to the coffee shop and sold
them to those teenagers for a fortune. Maybe then we could have used
that money to purchase health care for working people who have somehow
fallen through the cracks in our gigantic, ever-corrupt system.

Rae
tells me that since his incident became public, he has talked to 100
people, 97 of whom have had the same thing happen to them. And out
of 50 people he’s talked to locally, it’s happened to half of them
in the last week.

According
to the company, these kinds of mix-ups are extremely rare.

I
get a good laugh out of Rae when I suggest that this story may very
well kill any chance I ever had at becoming a P.R. agent for the Walgreens
company.

As
I write this, I know full well that the executives of Walgreens and
every major pharmaceutical company will sleep soundly in their mansions
and houses tonight, perhaps even with the help of some of their own
products. I won’t, and neither will Michael Rae or anyone in his family.

Instead,
Rae said he plans to take that whole bunch of pills and flush them
right down the toilet to keep them out of the wrong hands.

I
think Rae might just be on to something. Drastic measures are needed,
and we all must remain vigilant…at least until this War on Drugs is
finally over.

W.
Scott Jorgensen is a resident of Grants Pass, Oregon and serves as the
news director for KAJO and KLDR radio.
He has reported for various daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and also
worked as a press secretary for a 2004 Congressional campaign and as an
aide in the 2005 Oregon Legislature. He can be reached at: williamjorgensen@hotmail.com.

Rae
tells me that since his incident became public, he has talked to 100 people,
97 of whom have had the same thing happen to them. And out of 50 people
he’s talked to locally, it’s happened to half of them in the last week.